LONDON, GB / ACCESS Newswire / March 26, 2025 / Vana and Flower Labs are joining forces to create COLLECTIVE-1 - the world's first decentralized, user-owned foundation model. An unprecedented step in realizing the future of AI, this revolutionary model will leverage rich, user-contributed data while ensuring individuals retain complete ownership and control over their information.

A New Era for AI: Beyond Web-Scraped Data

Most AI models rely on publicly available internet data, limiting their capabilities. This groundbreaking foundation model takes AI a step further, enabling millions to safely contribute private data in a decentralized, privacy-preserving way. By leveraging individual data rights, it moves beyond the silos of traditional tech giants.

By combining Vana's user-owned data network with Flower's decentralized AI training framework, COLLECTIVE-1 enhances cognitive capabilities, expands real-world applications, and empowers individuals to directly benefit from the data they share.

Vana and Flower

Vana: The first open, decentralized network for user-owned data. Vana enables individuals to contribute, control, and monetize their personal data through its secure compute environment and DataDAO ecosystem. Today, the Vana network includes tens of millions of user-owned data points - ranging from conversational and social message data to health metrics, sleep data, location data, and car telemetry.

Flower Labs: The world's leading open-source framework for federated learning and the largest decentralized AI developer community. Flower Labs pioneered training foundation models using decentralized methods, achieving 1B, 3B, and 7B-sized LLMs with globally distributed GPUs.

What This Unlocks for Builders

This collaboration allows developers to build AI models using richer, more diverse datasets than traditional web scraping. As this decentralized foundation model evolves, it will provide documented methods and examples for training AI on DataDAO datasets. Builders gain access to real-world, user-contributed data-freeing AI development from the walled gardens of major tech companies.

A Scalable Vision for Decentralized AI

Millions of data points are already being contributed through the Vana network, with plans to scale participation tenfold by year's end. This initiative isn't just an experiment - it's the foundation of a user-driven AI movement where individuals gain direct ownership of the AI they help create.

"Foundation models concentrate unprecedented economic power in a few AI giants. COLLECTIVE-1 changes this paradigm. Our partnership with Flower enables millions of users to contribute their data to a federated AI model, creating a collectively owned system with data advantages no single company could match," said Anna Kazlauskas, creator of Vana, and CEO, Open Data Labs.

"Decentralized AI training is key to unlocking AI's next frontier. Our results show large federated foundation models are feasible. With Vana, we will demonstrate how a distributed, user-owned model can outperform existing alternatives and set a new standard across critical domains," said Nic Lane, Chief Scientific Officer, Flower Labs.

Learn More & Get Involved

Developers can start building today using the open-source Flower framework. Technical documentation is available in this blog post.

More details will be shared at Flower AI Summit 2025, where Anna Kazlauskas will discuss data sovereignty and decentralized AI. Flower Labs will unveil its latest advancements in federated and decentralized AI training.

Recent Announcements:

TechCrunch: Flower Labs Launches a New AI Service

The Block: Vana and Crypto-AI

CoinDesk: Why Data Portability Matters

Together, Vana and Flower Labs are pioneering a decentralized AI revolution - where users are in control, and AI remains truly open.

SOURCE: Vana Foundation